Fair warning. Michael Connelly’s latest book is not a Harry Bosch thriller or a Mickey Haller Lincoln Lawyer romp.
FAIR WARNING marks the return of Jack McEvoy, the investigative journalist who headlined The Poet and The Scarecrow. It also features the incomparable Rachel Walling, former FBI profiler turned private eye.
Fair warning, FAIR WARNING starts with a shocking murder, a gruesome attack on a woman by a man using brute force that culminates in atlanto-occipital dislocation, internal decapitation.
Profuse apology for the pun, but Connelley makes no apology for an ensuing breakneck pace as he hurtles his characters through four hundred pages of homicide and a relentless hunt for a serial killer who calls himself The Shrike.
In selecting his victims, The Shrike has been working off a list of women who had sent DNA samples of themselves to a popular genetic analyses site. The women’s genetic profiles were downloaded from a site on the dark web that cater to a clientele of men seeking sexual advantage.
The site is called Dirty4 where customers pay a fee to download the identities and locations of women whose DNA contained the chromosome pattern indicative of risky behaviours like drug and sex addiction.
FAIR WARNING is terrifying in both plot and narrative. With so many people using DNA services for hereditary purposes, the use of supplied material becomes an ethical and security minefield, the tenets of anonymity annihilated.
That this highly personal information is shared by incels, the so called involuntary celibates who fester in a mire of misogyny, who have feelings of entitlement to sex, and endorse violence against women, ratchets the scary scale to scream level.
As contemporary as Covid-19, FAIR WARNING concerns itself with the virus of violence against women that plagues us every day. Compassionate and brilliantly exciting, it’s also a tale of character, for every member of the cast is worth meeting whether their actions be commendable or contemptible.
FAIR WARNING by Michael Connelly is published by Allen & Unwin